April 2012
52 posts
2 tags
Cash spills on the highway: What would you do? →
David Dishneau of the AP on what one woman would do:
Chicago billing clerk Stephany Harris, 53, didn’t miss a beat.
“Of course I would,” she said. “If the armored car had been in an accident of something, I’d make sure the drivers were OK and I’d call 911. But I’d put as much money in my pockets (as I could) and run.”
But what if her kids were...
3 tags
Group sought wedge between blacks, gays to fight... →
CNN:
“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies,” another memo states. “Find, equip, energize and connect African-American spokespeople for marriage; develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these...
March 2012
55 posts
2 tags
Modern Mechanix: Mars Refuses to Answer Radio... →
Modern Mechanix time, this time from the May 1929 issue of Modern Mechanics:
The latest evidence of the unsocial nature of the Martians came recently when Dr. H. Mansfield Robinson, shown in the picture at the left, attempted to send a message to a woman on Mars who, he reported, had been in communication with him. Although listeners all over the world were on the alert for her response, it...
3 tags
4 tags
Earl Scruggs dies at 88 →
Steve Martin, writing in The New Yorker earlier this year:
As boys in the little community of Flint Hill, near Shelby, North Carolina, Earl and his brother Horace would take their banjo and guitar and start playing on the porch, then split up and meet behind the house. Their goal was to still be on the beat when they rejoined at the back. Momentously, when he was ten years old, after a fight...
3 tags
2 tags
Science decodes 'internal voices' →
Jason Palmer, BBC News:
[T]he team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.
With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.
They were even able to reconstruct some of the words,...
2 tags
Church Stages Kidnapping of Youth Group Members →
Colleen Curry, ABC News:
A church pastor in Pennsylvania could face felony charges for staging a fake kidnapping of youth group students in order to teach them about religious persecution.
Teenagers at the Glad Tidings Assembly of God Church in Middletown, Pa., were surprised when they attended a youth group meeting at the church on March 21 and were ambushed by what seemed to be real...
2 tags
6 tags
Video of Nas performing "Illmatic" live at SXSW →
This is not to be missed. DJ Premier is on the turntables (and acting as hype man), and AZ and Pete Rock both show up. Seriously, this is really, really great stuff.
(Probably my favorite part is that Premier is wearing an Illmatic T-shirt. That’s a level so completely beyond “wearing the band’s T-shirt to their show” that I don’t even know if it’s cool or...
2 tags
Remembrances of First Dates Past →
What if scenes from our lives were critiqued by reviewers?
Here’s a short piece by John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, that ran in Book magazine in 2002. It’s also featured in expanded form in Warner’s book Fondling Your Muse, which I recommend if only just for the best burn of Tom Clancy ever committed to paper.
2 tags
Debunking the Universal Grammar... or not →
Fantastic profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Tom Bartlett of the “war of words” (I’m so sorry) that has erupted between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky on whether Everett has debunked Chomsky’s ill-defined “Universal Grammar”. The whole piece is fantastic, but this was my favorite bit, from later on in the article.
Everett is far from the only...
3 tags
PBS NewsHour (2012-03-22): Ahmed Rashid: 'Enormous... →
PBS NewsHour had a nice segment yesterday a few days ago with journalist Ahmed Rashid on the complex relationship between the U.S., Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. This is how the interviewer Ray Suarez introduced what I found to be the most interesting tidbit:
In the book, you take us deep inside those negotiations begun quite clandestinely in Germany with go-betweens, safe passage for...
3 tags
Henry Farrell's Part in Stephen J. Dubner's Upfall →
Apparently in 2005 Crooked Timber held an online seminar discussing the book — the content in the seminar seems honest to me. But somewhere along the lines, something went wrong, and Farrell now regrets it:
But even if it seemed a good idea at the time, I should have known better. Yes – Levitt is an interesting and original economist, but the glib contrarianism and breezy confidence...
2 tags
3 tags
Israeli law eyes super-thin models as bad examples →
Daniella Cheslow writing for the AP about a new Israeli law that regulates the thinness of models in advertisements:
The new law requires models to produce a medical report no older than three months at every shoot for the Israeli market, stating that they are not malnourished by World Health Organization standards.
The U.N. agency relies on the body mass index, calculated by factors of...
2 tags
Mali troops declare coup, loot presidential palace →
AP:
Drunken soldiers looted Mali’s presidential palace hours after they declared a coup on Thursday, suspending the constitution and dissolving the institutions of one of the few established democracies in this troubled corner of Africa.
Mali adopted a democratic constitution in August of 1991. The coup that lead to that constitution happened on March 26, almost twenty-one years ago...
5 tags
Michael K. Williams is going to play Ol' Dirty... →
Great casting choice. Dirty comin’, yo!
3 tags
Letters of Note: The Empire State Building (Helen... →
Letters of Note here with a description by Helen Keller of her experience at the top of the Empire State Building.
What did I “see and hear” from the Empire Tower? As I stood there ‘twixt earth and sky, I saw a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary. I saw it stand erect and serene in the midst of storm and...
5 tags
